Page 72 of Wicked Surrender

Kristin peered at me as we got lunch. She sipped her milkshake and narrowed her eyes at me as I tidied up the wrappers from my food to throw it away. “What?”

“You seem different,” she said.

Oh, God. Please don’t say I have a freaking glow or something like that.“How?”

She shrugged. “More tired.”

“Ah.” That wasn’t so bad. And truth be told, I wasn’t sleeping all that well. Now that I knew how good it felt to have Jason’s dick deep inside me, my dreams about him were even more vivid.

I imagined that if I didn’t live at home, I’d be way more sleep-deprived than this. I’d want him all the time. To go to sleep with him still in me, then to wake up to him putting his mouth on me.

Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah, no one’s getting ahead of herself and thinking of anything long-term, huh?

I sighed, paying attention to my friend so she wouldn’t get suspicious.

“Not sleeping well?” she guessed.

“No. I mean…” I shrugged. “Life can suck sometimes.”

“I bet you could say that again. Is that asshole still being a pain in the ass when you tutor him?”

You just had to go there.“Um. Yeah.”

“He’s still not even trying to get his grades up?”

It was more like he kept getting up for me…

“Maybe one day.”

She shook her head sadly. “Whatever. He won’t be your problem forever.”

I caught myself from frowning at that.

After spending a lot of time and energy trying to cover this secret relationship that Jason and I had started, I realized that I would never be able to come clean and tell her the truth. She wouldn’t believe me. While she would be the only person to ever not judge me in the end, there was no doubt that my family would react horribly. My mom still sent me messages to reconsider and to give Ethan a second chance.

Not happening.

My dad, Mai, even my grandparents. None of them would approve of my wanting to be with a guy like Jason, so it didn’t cross my mind to tell any of them.

“Are you sure that’s all?” Kristin asked. “You’ve been different lately. It’s just lousy sleep?”

Dammit.She wasn’t letting this go. “Well, I printed out that research application again,” I confided in her, eager to change the topic. I’d already told her about my dad coming to berate me about my wishes to change my major.

She grinned. “Did you fill it out?”

“I submitted it too. Just to see. You know? Just to see if they’d accept me and if the tuition could be covered. Hypothetically.”

“Sure. Sure. I mean, why wouldn’t they want a genius like you?” She rolled her eyes.

I smiled, a real one. My organic chem instructors often told me how they thought I was going places, and when they said it, it was just a measurement and critique of my hard work, not my status as Dean Chen’s daughter or the fact that Mai was my sibling. None of the teachers ever referred to me as “Mai’s sister”. In that department, they knew me as… well, me. Laura.

“I’m so excited for you to go for it. I’ll be with you every step of the way,” she encouraged.

I held my hand up. “Hold on. I just said I turned the form in. I’m nowhere near the stage of confidence that I’d need to actually stand up to my dad.”

She sighed. “Someday.”

Maybe.

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